Thursday, 15 December 2016

Bethlehem's star

Some time ago someone asked me what the actual star was that appeared at Jesus' birth. It's a question that has occupied the minds of many scholars and religious leaders over the last millennia because when you go back to the period of Jesus' birth, let's say from 10 to 1 BC, you come to the conclusion that nothing interesting at all happened from an astronomical viewpoint.

Some say that it was a comet, but for as far as we know there were no bright comets in that period. Perhaps there was a one-off bright comet - certainly not all of them have regular orbits - but its appearance hasn't been recorded by anyone.

Some argue that it was a supernova explosion, but this is impossible because these explosions always leave a visible trace in the sky.

During the last 50 years, there have been ever more claims that the star wasn't a real star at all but in fact an unusual position of one or the other planet in one or the other zodiac sign. These claims are again very unlikely because they're always based on greek astrology - which is unfortunately still being used today - whereas the magi or 3 kings came from Persia. Just for your information, babylonian and persian astrology was completely different from its greek counterpart and was based on a system of 17 or 18 zodiac signs. This means that all of these planet-zodiac theories are based on the wrong information.

But there's an even bigger mystery that none of the above possibilities can explain, i.e. how it was possible that the 3 kings who came from the east and who followed a star in the east could still end up in Bethlehem, in the west?!

The answer has only been discovered recently, in the 1980's if I'm not mistaking, and it's actually very simple. In order to explain it in a way that everybody can understand, I've created this small video.